Can learning be delivered through media?
Back in the day when Netscape was new and gigabyte was an unfamiliar word, I took a job at the University of Rhode Island to pilot a tool to improve teaching: technology. One of the instructors that I worked with, hoping to teach gravity equations in a more tangible way, captured video of himself throwing eggs off the tallest building on campus. By pulling out still images of the fall and using the windows on the building as fixed distances, he was able to show the increase in distance per second caused by the force of gravity on the egg. This was accompanied by a graphic display of the equations and the music “Free Falling” by Tom Petty.
In instructional design we often refer to this sort of product as a “deliverable”. This term implies a belief that as instructional designers we have the power to deliver learning. One may ask at this point, is it possible to deliver learning like you might deliver a pizza. Can creating a piece of instructional media really make a difference? Well… yes, it can. Let me tell a story about when I became convinced of the power of delivering multimedia content.
A couple of years ago I was asked to be a guest speaker at a high school in Provo. My topic, the Argentine government’s abuse of political protesters, did not seem justly treated by a few lines of stuffy text. I decided to work on an educational “deliverable”, a multimedia presentation on the “vanished” Argentinean protesters. I began by combining images of the victims, historical facts, and excerpts from the journals of the survivors. I mixed these things with the Sting song “They Dance Alone”, written in response to the “vanished”. As the students began to watch the video, they began to feel what it was all about. I was no longer teaching – the presentation was delivering the content to the students in a way far superior that what I could have done by talking about it. Like the physics professor, I too watched the students leave the classroom with a new understanding, some with tears in their eyes. This has been the motivating force that has driven me to study and learn more about the power of instructional design.
Ps: The “Vahished” presentation that I created is now online on the Vanished Gallery site in case you want to take a look at it.